Gemini Wants to Get Personal. You Should Let It - DTNS 5185

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 14th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know. We give you important context. Gosh, darn it. We're trying to help each other understand, okay? Okay. Today, Gemini wants to get personal, Tom, but should we let it? I don't know. It's a big step. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. So Google now offers a feature in Gemini called personal intelligence that can customize responses to you if you turn it on. It is off by default. That is important to repeat. It is off by default. I think a lot of people will probably assume that it's on by default, but it's not.

0:44If you turn it on, it will then proactively include information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google Search, and YouTube history when it thinks it might help it answer or give a better response. You can choose which of those it can access. You don't have to turn them all on. It's not all or nothing. You can say, just do photos or just do Gmail. and this is different than the access of give it access to Gmail. So if I ask it specifically to go into Gmail and do something, it will do it. This is proactively. You say you can access this whenever you need. So it might go in and find a specific detail in your email because you asked about something without saying, go find it in my email.

1:24It might find something in a photo or when it's using its reasoning model, it could benefit from a more complex response drawn across multiples of those sources. Google says that they are not training on your personal data. This is just inferencing. They are just referencing it when you ask about certain things. It's going and looking at it. VP of Gemini, Josh Woodard, gave the example of using it in a tire shop. Apparently, he was in a tire shop, didn't know his car tire size, asked Gemini. Gemini went and looked at his Google photos and then proactively suggested getting all weather tires since it noticed indications that his family takes multiple road trips.

2:03Gemini will avoid sensitive topics, things like health, unless you specifically ask about it. Google also gave some example prompts if you're still having a hard time wrapping your head around it. It thinks personal intelligence would be good at, based on my delivery and grocery receipts in Gmail search history and YouTube watch history, recommend five YouTube channels that match my cooking style or meal prep vibe. Seems a little wordy, but you get the idea. another shorter one was recommend some documentaries based on what i've been curious about right and so then it'll look at your search look at your youtube etc personal intelligence rolling out to google ai pro and ai ultra subscribers in beta in the u.s more regions and the free tier will follow eventually so uh google photos wouldn't totally apply to the situation that i was in recently, but I needed to get my car VIN number recently.

3:00My Volvo has an app that is great for all sorts of things, but for some reason got disconnected. And I knew that I had taken a photo of my VIN number somewhere at some point. It happened to be pouring cats and dogs outside at the time. So I was like, I could just like go down to my car and take a photo, but it was like very rainy. So I was like, you know, I know what's in here somewhere. I had to go back a few years. that I found the photo and it was in iOS photos. So Google photos wasn't, um, wasn't, wasn't the deal, but you know, it was slightly cumbersome. It would have been great to just be like, Hey, Google, can you find that?

3:36Can you find that photo? What's my VIN? Just, yeah. You could just say that. And it'll, you know, instead of saying, go look in Google photos, which is what you would have had to do before. Let's, let's pretend you had all your stuff at Google photos. Just for the example, you could say, what's my VIN? And it would be like, well, let me see if I can find a photo of it or a Gmail reference to it. You don't have to know where it's stored. You just are like, I think it's probably in there somewhere. Yeah. And that's where I, you know, because when I first read the story, I was like, gosh, how does this apply to me?

4:04You know, I don't really, I don't really want Gemini to tell me what to make for dinner tonight based on what I've made before because I like variety. However, there are always those use cases where you're like, actually, that was really helpful. So I think, I think that's what Google is going for here. What if you ask it to recommend a recipe you've never made before based on what it knows about you? I don't think you like watermelon, Sarah. Here's a watermelon salad recipe. Let's get crazy. I could go wrong. I also think that because Google already has access to all of this information, right?

4:41You're not going to a third party. You're going to Google. They already have access to your Gmail. They're storing your Gmail. and they're saying the right thing and saying, we're not training on this. We're not going to go and scan your Gmail and train our models on it. We're just pointing the model at it when it thinks it might be able to find the answer there. I think this is probably worth doing if you use these kinds of tools at all, right? If you're like, no AI for me, then no, this doesn't change that. But if you're already in the system using this kind of stuff, I think you're just saying, yes, make my life a little easier and make your answers a little better and more personal for me.

5:18I'm probably missing some horrible, terrifying result that could come from this. But right now, I'm not seeing anything terribly, terribly dangerous about doing this other than what's already dangerous about using AI in general. Well, and the whole you don't need to opt out is a big part of this. You opt in and if you're like, not for me, then you opt out. then you know it's it's all good you use google services the way that you used to in the past i would love to know if somebody was like gosh here's a use case i didn't even think of but it really helped me you know let us know personal intelligence if you've it makes it sound like an insult personal intelligence that if you have any personally if you have any personal intelligence if you get access to this feature and you let us know Well, DTNS is made possible by all you intelligent people listening.

6:10Our listeners, thanks to Howard Yermisch, John Atwood, Pat, and we've got a couple new patrons. Let's all give a warm welcome to Christian and Kate. Ah, we love you. Thanks for coming in. We appreciate you.

6:26All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get right to the briefs. The information sources have some details about how Apple will use Google's Gemini. there will be no Google or Gemini branding, and most of what the information found aligns with what Apple has previously promised with Siri. Things like understanding your personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper app controls. It can remember past conversations and pull context from your personal information, somewhat similar to Gemini's personal intelligence, which Google obviously just launched. Meanwhile, Yahoo Finance's sources say that Google will get licensing revenue and cloud revenue from this deal, meaning it will likely provide some data center services for Apple.

7:08Yeah. Unlike the search thing, this is Apple paying Google for a service. So this isn't, let's brand it. This is, if you're a regular user who doesn't listen to Daily Tech News show, doesn't read the tech news, you will likely never know that Gemini is providing the backend. This is Google being a service provider to improve Siri. And there will be an interesting divide of people going like, wow, it got really, really good this time around. And they're going to talk about it at WWDC, of course, and that's when we'll get the update. And then other people going, well, you know, it's because it's Gemini behind there.

7:48I can't decide if this is a horrible mistake for Apple, falling behind, if it's a good way for them to catch up while they develop their own thing like they did with maps uh or if it's just an example of apple saying you know what we're we're never going to be good at everything we never created a search engine nor should we create a foundational model that's just that's just a service you can buy and we're going to buy it from google uh the maps uh comparison was immediately uh what came to mind for me with this it's like for for years apple was like google maps that's what everybody wants to use anyway Then Apple Maps came on the scene.

8:26Apple Maps in the early days sucked compared to Google Maps. And it is vastly different today. But it took a while. I mean, you still have Street View, which is like Apple only has some Street View and Google has basically the whole world. Google is far ahead of Apple in many situations like this. I think that using Gemini to just kind of get Apple back on the map, as it were, is the right call at this point. You know, it's like Apple's like, we need a bridge. We need a bridge. And then we can work on our own thing during that bridge period and, you know, perhaps come out, you know, swinging at some point.

9:09But, you know, they're playing catch up right now. So what other choice do they have? Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the short term, it's definitely the right decision for playing catch up. Where I get hung up is that large language models and these foundational models do tend to appear more like an operating system than they do like a feature like Maps. And Apple not having control of the entire stack of what it does, operating system, et cetera, with the hardware does seem odd. It does seem very un-Apple. like. You could make a comparison. This is similar to them switching to OS X where they used an open source Unix-like background to create OS X, but this isn't using an open source background.

9:57This is licensing a service from someone else. So yeah, there's some interesting arguments on all sides of this that either this is exactly what they need to do or a horrible mistake, and it's probably a little of both, honestly. I mean, I think it really does point to this is a new reality for a lot of tech companies. Your tech is better than our tech. We want to license your tech so that we stay relevant. If OpenAI comes out with hardware in a couple of years, which it plans to, that eats Apple's lunch, this is going to look like a horrible mistake because then Apple's going to get left behind.

10:32But that's a tall ask, right? Even with Johnny Ivan House, that's a tall ask. We are doing our best to help each other understand the chip situation between the US and China, including NVIDIA in the middle and AMD in there as well. Here's what we have for you today. Tuesday, the U.S. government approved NVIDIA for export of its second most powerful chip, the H200, soon to be third most powerful with the advent of Rubin, but right now it's the second most powerful chip. Chinese companies can import H200s from the U.S. with some caveats. A third party in the U.S. will review all chips to confirm their technical capabilities to make sure they're not overpowered.

11:11And NVIDIA may not ship more than 50 % of the total amount of chips sold to U.S. customers. They can't sell the majority of their chips to China. Chinese customers will have to demonstrate sufficient security procedures, and they may not use the chips for military purposes. Reuters estimates Chinese companies have placed orders for more than 2 million H200 chips at$27 ,000 each, which makes you understand why NVIDIA would like to sell these. NVIDIA, by all estimates, has about 700 ,000 in stock, but they said at CES they plan to ramp up production. However, on Wednesday, the Chinese government banned the entrance of H200 chips in the country, with the information reporting that exemptions will only be given for development labs and university research, at least for now.

11:58These things tend to come and go. They put on a ban and then they ease it up. Chinese firms have been told not to purchase the chips unless absolutely necessary. So they're making it hard for them to execute on this. China also instructed companies to stop using security software from around a dozen U.S. and Israeli security companies. That includes VMware, Palo Alto Networks, Checkpoint, and Fortinet. So I threw that in there mostly just to point out like this is a political governmental negotiation going on. And these policies aren't based on what's best for economics, certainly not based on what's best for technology.

12:35So if they don't make sense, it's because we don't know what the negotiations are. China is, of course, trying to boost its domestic chip making. And one startup called Knowledge Atlas Technology, also known as Xipu, released an open source multimodal model image generation model called GLM Image, which it says was trained entirely on Huawei's Ascend chips. We'll see how good this is, but Xipu went public last Thursday. So it is a step to be able to even release a model that is trained domestically. And that's what China wants. They want to be able to not have to rely on U.S. chips to make their industry.

13:10So they're trying to slow down the dependence on it while fostering companies like Zhipu to be able to operate without them. I think the Chinese government banning the entrance of H-200 ships really speaks to what might be going on behind the scenes. I don't think the country would do that with such authority unless it felt that there were other very viable options in the mix. Or they think they can get a concession out of the U.S. like we're going to ban them at the port for now unless you do whatever it is they want you to do. and then we'll ease up, but we're still going to advise people not to buy them unless absolutely necessary.

13:51Like, yeah, it's a fast-moving mess. Well, this may be a mess or not, depending on where you stand on the issue. The Wall Street Journal reports that actor Matthew McConaughey has received USPTO approval for eight trademark applications meant to stop generative apps from using his likeness or voice without permission. The trademarks include a seven-second clip of him standing on a porch, a three-second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree, and a recording of him saying, all right, all right, all right. You might know the third one. While state laws in the U.S. already prohibit the use of image or likeness for certain purposes without permission, McConaughey's lawyers believe that this is going to provide an additional deterrent.

14:41McConaughey and his lawyers hope new laws will eventually make such trademarks unnecessary. Worth noting, McConaughey is an investor in 11 labs. He also recently licensed his voice to them to create a version of his newsletter in Spanish. Yeah, McConaughey, I mean, And he famously did that cryptocurrency commercial in the Super Bowl, too. He's not a celebrity who is lashing out against technology. I think he's reasonably trying to find ways to protect himself so that he can make sure that when technology uses his intellectual property, that they're doing it with his permission and his benefit.

15:20This is an interesting way of going about it. And his lawyers even said, we would like there to be a law that just applied to generational images so we wouldn't have to try to come up with workarounds like this. Yeah, I think what he is attempting to trademark is very specific. At the same time, if you are known for certain things, I'm not sure about the Christmas tree or the porch, but the all right, all right, all right, we all know that. Most of us do anyway. I can see where you go, you know, this is totally me. It's not just some funny thing that lots of actors say. It's very much me. And I want to control that, especially because I have, you know, I have some irons in the fire where it comes to stuff that I am either, you know, have invested in or, you know, companies that I'm directly working with.

16:14I don't hate this. I don't. I don't know how successful they're going to be, but I think it's okay for someone to say, you know what, let's figure out what's okay and what isn't. Yeah. One thing to keep in mind is because this is trademark, trademark law says you are using this as a way to identify your property. And if anyone uses something that causes confusion as to whether it's you or not, that is a violation of your trademark. So it does sound weird to have just a clip of him standing on a porch as a trademark. But if what you're doing is trying to say, hey, generative model, hey, Sora, you can't create a picture of Matthew McConaughey without my permission, you want to have things like that.

16:57Because if Matthew McConaughey is standing anywhere in that image, you can say, this is similar to my trademark of me standing on a porch and therefore might cause confusion as to whether this was created by me or created by this generational image with a generator without my permission. Like you said, it's a question whether a judge will go for it or not. But I see where they're coming from, which is we're trying to find elements that might be used by a generative model so that we can say, ah, that's similar to this, that's similar to that. And not Clint Eastwood also standing on a porch saying, get off my lawn.

17:33Right, totally different thing. Exactly. All right, let's finish up with some quick headlines that are good to know. might make you look smarter in the future if you know these things. A week after announcing it at CES, NVIDIA is rolling out DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution for users of GeForce RTX GPUs. With PCMag reporting, folks have been admiring how it can upscale things like a 240p render from Elder Scrolls 7, 6 rather, to a playable 720p. Yeah, this is getting a lot of excitement, but good to know. you can go out and get it actually elder scrolls four elder scrolls four oh good to know uh nintendo began rolling out its free update to animal crossing new horizons ahead of schedule it wasn't supposed to come till thursday january 15th uh but you can get it now the update adds a resort hotel and a research reset service among other things youtube is adding more uh and new parental controls including a more age appropriate video recommendation and the ability to set a time limit, including a limit of zero minutes.

18:40If somebody is not getting their dinner tonight, no YouTube for you for viewing shorts on teen accounts. Independent music platform Bandcamp announced that it prohibits any music or audio on its platform now that is wholly or insubstantial part made by generative models. So no slop. Thank you. Not on Bandcamp. Tesla will no longer offer its driver assistant features, aka FSD, for a one-time fee. This may apply to some of you. Starting February 14th of Valentine's Day, you will have to pay a$99 per month subscription if you want that feature. Because they love you. Workforce AI compiled a report for CNBC that showed hiring for energy-related jobs peaked in 2024, up 34%, but still rose 30 % in 2025 as tech companies look to bolster energy sources for data centers.

19:34You got some energy knowledge. They want to hire you. Nikkei Asia reports that glass cloth fiber used as a substrate in chips is the latest component to feel a shortage due to high demand for data center chips. Apple has used it for years. Now we've got NVIDIA, Qualcomm, AMD, Google, and Amazon all starting to buy it as well. That causes them to turn to smaller, non-Japanese suppliers in China and Taiwan. Oh, man. This is going to get uglier before it gets better, I think. The Information reports that Anthropic is fast becoming one of Microsoft's favorite suppliers. Microsoft now on pace to spend$500 million on Anthropic models this year.

20:17Apple announced that Civilization 7, see, I knew there was a 7 somewhere on the show, will arrive on Apple Arcade starting February 5th with customized controls for touchscreen along with the usual mouse and keyboard. I love Civilization. I'm very excited to try to avoid doing this too much because it will waste all my time, but it's great. And you know what? We're not Roman. We speak English. Don't ask us to do these numbers. Speak for yourself, Tom. Very Roman. I'm really not. We do live streams. If you want to catch us just hanging out, we do a mailbag show on Tuesday. We do DTNS Live on Thursday.

20:57Hangouts on Friday. If you want to just hang out with us live, become a subscriber. YouTube.com slash Daily Tech News Show.

21:07We like to end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. And today, that Charlie dude has a question for moi. Indeed. He writes, hi, group. I'm interested in hearing Sarah's thoughts on the recent meta layoffs in general and how this affects the Supernatural workout app in particular. Sarah has mentioned using Supernatural several times on the network, so I'd appreciate hearing her take. Is she planning to stick with Supernatural until it dies, or is she switching to another workout app? By the way, if she switches, I'd be interested in hearing a Live With It episode on it. Thanks. Y 'all rock.

21:44That Charlie dude. Oh, that Charlie dude. Well, thank you for telling us we rock. I am actually very worried about this. So Supernatural has been my go to VR exercise app for years. It's not inexpensive. But when you compare it to, I don't know, a yearly gym subscription, it actually, if you're dedicated, it really is a great workout. You could do it in your own living room, bedroom, whatever. I used to use it in my garage. And it's great. So part of the news of Meta laying off some of its division that is dedicated to VR is that the Supernatural app, and this was actually something that I saw on Facebook because the official Supernatural community Facebook group posted this, is that they are no longer going to give you new workouts, but you have the entire library to still work with.

22:47Now, if that's true, it's a big library. I mean, I could use that for years and not complain about it. I mean, there are tons of workouts that I just have never tried, you know, or certain songs where I'm like, I don't feel like that song right now. I'm, you know, I'm going to go Kendrick rather than, you know, 311. So I don't think it means it's dead. However, it does mean that the coaches that have been providing really great workout, very customizable workouts to you, aren't going to be doing new stuff. So it's not dead in the water, but it's mostly dead. It's on life support. It's on life support.

23:26Again, with that library. And I will go back to if I'm like, I want to do a medium for 40 minutes. It's like I can listen to the same songs over and over. However, licensing of those songs was always a big part of why Supernatural got all the good songs that it did. I don't know what's going to happen in the future when this all is sort of just like, I mean, did they pay for those license agreements in perpetuity? Hard to say. Yeah. Or is it covered under some general meta license for music? Because Instagram has a license for music. Is it covered under that somehow? If people use it less, does that mean they have to pay less because it counts as streams?

24:06I don't know. Yeah, a lot of unanswered questions. But Charlie, I'm glad you brought that up. I don't know personally of any other workout app that is as enjoyable and fun, you know, not just like, oh, I have to work out right now, but like enjoyable and fun than Supernatural. If there is one, I would be willing to try it out. And I would definitely be willing to review it on an episode of Live With It in the future. Isn't Beat Saber the one that everybody used to compare Supernatural to? Beat Saber sucks compared to Supernatural. No, I'm not. Listen, if you like Beat Saber, I'm not, you know, I'm not bagging on you at all.

24:41I just think that Supernatural is like an actual workout app. Yeah, yeah. Not sort of like a fun thing. It's like it's truly a workout thing. So, yeah, I mean, the more the more options we have, the better. But I don't know. We might have to be looking to other companies besides better for this. Yeah. Yeah. And I was confused at first because I thought, oh, they must have closed that studio, but they didn't close within, which is the studio that makes it. They just cut back on it. They put it into maintenance mode, even though they did close three other VR studios. So who knows? There's always a chance that after they've saved some money for a while, they come back around and putting some investment into this might boost the numbers again.

25:21Let's do that. Probably not, but you never know. Also, I think Supernatural is a great example of something that a small number of people, I mean, relative to the entire world, small number of people love a lot. If there aren't enough of us, it goes into maintenance mode. That's just kind of how things go. And that can be a huge bummer for you. But again, if there aren't enough of you, we're not scaling. Well, you might have thoughts on what we've talked about today. What are you thinking about? You have insight into a story we've talked about today or might talk about in the future. Share it with us.

26:01Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Thanks to that Charlie dude for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business. Become a patron or a Substack subscriber. Patreon.com slash DTNS. DTNS.substack.com.

26:25The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.